MIGRAINE
PRAYER AGAINST THE HEADACHE
Migraine came
out from the sea rioting and roaring, and our Lord Jesus Christ came to meet him
and said to it: “Where are you going, O headache and migraine and pain in the
skull and in the eyes and inflammation and tears and leukoma and dizziness?”
And the Headache
answered our Lord Jesus Christ: “We are going to sit down in the head of the
servant of God, NN.”
And our Lord
Jesus Christ said to it: “Look here, do not go into my servant, but be off altogether
and go into the mountains and settle in a bull’s head. There you may eat flesh,
there drink blood, there ruin the eyes, there darken the head, seethe and
wriggle. But if you do not obey me, I shall destroy you there on the mountain
where no dog barks and cock does not crow.”
You who have set
a limit to the sea stop headache and migraine and the pain in the skull and
between the eyes and on the lids and from the narrow from the servant of the Lord,
NN.
In [this
spell], the headache is personified as a demon who is told to depart from the
half-part of the head of the sufferer and go off . . . into a remote part of
the mountains where it can find the head of a wild bull to torment. In the
story, the divine power exerts its authority over the demon, forcing it to obey,
exactly the effect that the sufferer wishes for his own headache. Since migraines
often recur in family lines, it is interesting to note that, although the text
of the silver amulet comes from the first or second century CE, the grave in
Austria in which it was found dates to the third century, suggesting that the
amulet may have been passed down in the family to ward off an affliction that
was likewise passed down. (Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Drawing Down the Moon:
Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2019], 132-33)
